Although
the collapse of communist
regimes in 1989–1991 was regarded as heralding the death-knell for
radical left
parties (RLPs) (March and
Mudde, 2005), the picture is far murkier
today. A variety of RLPs have attained electoral visibility across
Europe,
often becoming direct challengers to the mainstream centre-left
(e.g. Lavelle,
2008). There are four principal reasons why
RLPs deserve attention. First, although most academic/policy attention
has
undoubtedly focused on populist/extreme/radical right parties (RRPs) as
the key
‘anti-political establishment parties’ (APEs) (e.g. Abedi, 2004; Backes and
Moreau, 2012; Mudde, 2007),
electoral support for European RLPs and
RRPs is approximately equivalent. For instance, in 2000–2011, the
average
support of parliamentary RLPs Europe-wide was 8.3 percent, that of RRPs
9.6
percent.1 In
many countries, RLP support was stable or increasing even prior to the
international financial-economic crisis. Second, RLP influence on
European
governments is increasing (e.g. Bale and
Dunphy, 2011; Olsen et
al., 2010). Whereas prior to 1989 RLP
government participation was very rare, in 1990–2012, 17 RLPs joined or
gave
legislative support to governments. In early 2012, RLPs were in
national
coalition in five European states (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway
and
Ukraine) and in single-party government in Cyprus. The governmental
participation
of parties that at best propose significant revisions to neo-liberal
economic
policies and at worst lack executive experience and have problematic
pasts
associated with populism and/or extremism poses increasing policy
challenges
for national and European elites.

Finally,
our
work has more general implications for studying party politics. First,
since
many of the demand-side preconditions for RLP success are omnipresent
in
European countries, this suggests that, exactly like RRPs, RLPs should
be regarded
not as marginal aberrancies of contemporary democracy, but rather as
actors who
express in radical form mainstream concerns (such as globalization
anxiety and
economic insecurity) and are therefore integral to today’s politics. As
such,
the key question is not why such parties have survived the fall of the
USSR,
but why so few have since exploited fertile ground (cf. Mudde,
2010). Second, we have
adapted a conceptual framework previously used almost exclusively for
RRPs to
the study of RLPs and produced a number of eminently testable
variables.
Neither the framework nor many of the variables are specific to the
radical
right, radical left or indeed niche parties. There is no reason why
such a
framework cannot be adapted to augment the scant comparative analysis
of why
other party families, individually or collectively, succeed or fail.